Page:Oscar Ameringer - Socialism for the Farmer (1912).djvu/15

 production, The handworker could not compete with the machine so he was forced to forsake his little shop and accept employment in the factory. The modern factory can be owned by one man, or at least by a very few people, but must be operated by many. Those who own the plant do not use the machinery and those who use it do not own it. Thus came about the separation between ownership and labor and the division of modern society into two hostile camps—capitalist on the one side and workers on the other.

Social production is now carried on for private profit. The instrument of labor becomes the means of exploitation. The product of the modern too] still goes to its owner, but this owner is a working man no longer, but a coupon-clipping, dividend-chasing capitalist. He may not have the slightest technical knowledge of the industry in which he has his money invested. The management and operation is entrusted to salaried employees who have no financial interest in the concern.

The individual trade is decomposed and specialized. Instead of one worker producing a pair of shoes all by himself, he performs only one single act in a long and complicated series. He not only lost the tools of his trade, but often the trade itself and he becomes more and more dependent on the owning class.

Specialization and co-operation with the help of machinery greatly increases the productive power of labor, but this increased productivity does not benefit the worker. His wages are not determined by the value of the product, but by the amount of money required to keep him in working condition. The dissolution of the union between ownership and labor brought untold misery to the toiling masses. But this painful transformation is but the birth-pain of a better day. The socialization of production will be followed by the social ownership of the means of production, thereby establishing on a high plane the union between ownership and labor.

Capitalism itself is developing the conditions for a society where Capital and Labor are one.

The farm of two generations ago was a productive unit. The family produced what it consumed and consumed what it produced. What little co-operation existed was carried on between the members of the family. The men folks produced the raw product in the field and the women prepared it for final consumption in the home. Grandmother was not only a housewife, but a candle and soap maker, she canned fruit,